Due to high traffic volumes on the World Wide Web and limited bandwidth of communication media, traffic bottlenecks can occur. A conventional technique for reducing the level of Internet traffic without reducing the level of service provided involves storing content, such as web pages, in the geographic vicinity of users who may wish to access the content. Thus, servers are typically positioned in various geographic locations.
Web pages accessed via the World Wide Web typically include both static and dynamic content. Static content is information that changes infrequently over time, such as formatting graphics, headings and categories for other information to be displayed by a web page. The technique of storing content at servers in various geographic locations is suitable for web pages that include only static content. This is because static content seldom changes and, thus, the content can be readily duplicated and distributed to the various servers.
Dynamic content changes more frequently. For example, dynamic content includes news articles, advertisements, photographs, current stock prices and so forth. In addition, dynamic content may be specific to a particular user. Thus, dynamic content provides for personalized web pages, such as to display a particular person's bank account balance or stock holdings. However, the technique of storing content at servers in various geographic locations is not generally applicable to dynamic content. This is because the need to repeatedly distribute the frequently-changing content to all of the various servers would tend to increase, rather than reduce, network traffic.
Internet content providers are increasingly providing dynamic content in order to make the content more attractive and useful to web users. Thus, much of the information accessed via the Internet is mixed content. However, because mixed content included both static and dynamic content, the same problems associated with distributing dynamic content occur for distributing mixed content.
Therefore, what is needed is an improved technique for reducing bandwidth requirements for communication media in a wide area network. What is further needed is such a technique which is suitable for reducing bandwidth requirements for communication of dynamic content and mixed content.